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Bacon Sauce

A sauce made by frying bacon, mixing its fat with butter, flour, liquid, and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bacon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the bacon pieces until brown.

  2. Pour the bacon fat into a stone jar. Place the bacon on a plate.

  3. In a bowl, mix the bacon fat, butter, and flour.

  4. Add hot water, whey, or soup stock to the mixture.

  5. Flavor the mixture with chopped parsley or strained tomato juice.

  6. Add the bacon to the mixture.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Butter + wheytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Flour + wheytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Browned pieces add savory, smoky flavor and meaty texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it mixes with the fat and liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded fat flavor to the sauce.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, whey):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, whey. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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